How Much Will My Home Sell For?

Dear Liz, We've been thinking about selling our home, but need to know how much our home will sell for to help make the decision. Can you help us determine what to expect? We'd love to take advantage of the low interest rates to buy a new home, but we're not sure we can afford to leave the home we have. Thanks! Joe Public

Dear Joe, First of all, YES, we can help you determine the expected selling price of your home, and that assessment won't cost you anything but some of your time when we meet with you to review your home. You're facing a common issue with many Warren County home sellers. Either home values for your area have dropped, or you didn't have a large down payment and it hasn't been that long since you purchased so your equity build up is negligible.

Here's how the process typically works for determining your home's value. When you first contact us, we're going to ask what features you've added to your home. Knowing what is different about your home helps us increase the accuracy of our valuation. You may have finished the basement, added hardwood floors, custom tiled your bathroom or any number of other things that impact valuation.

We're going to baseline your home first of all. We'll go to MLS and see if your home has ever been on the market and the information available. We'll also visit the Warren County auditor's site and pull public information on your home. Now we recognize the auditor's site might not always be accurate (square footage for instance often isn't as reported).

We'll pull the MLS information for your community for the last 6 months to a year depending on how many homes have sold. Obviously, the most recent and most similar carry the most weight. We'll review the Pendings to see what is about to go Sold. We won't know final price, but it will at least give us another input to what is happening right now. We'll also review the Active homes on the market. Are they like yours? How long have they been on market? Have they been adjusting price?

And lastly from MLS we'll look at the home sellers that quit the market. They also provide a loud message as to what the market will and won't do. Their price and product was rejected by the home buyers. There's valuable information there. We'll also review which homes are distressed properties (short sale and foreclosures). Their influence on pricing is critical too.

For your development, we'll also extract the tax records since not every home that sells is in MLS. For Sale by Owners and new construction typically won't be represented, and we need to account for ALL sales. We'll add some data like price per square foot and the ratio of recent sales prices to current tax assessments.

Now we're also going to factor in some bigger picture items. Is there new construction for you to compete with? In general, if buyers CAN buy new for the same price, they will unless they just don't have the time to wait. We're also going to consider the community trends. Is that school district tax fight killing home values and causing a decline? Or was there a recent announcement of 500 new jobs that will push demand for housing? What's the overall reputation of your community? Whether Mason, Lebanon, Springboro, Franklin, Maineville or Waynesville, they ALL offer a different set of pros and cons.

As you can see, the preparation work is pretty extensive, but we're STILL not done! To get the most accurate we can, we need to cross your threshold and see it in person. The condition of your home is another key factor. And lastly, we'll calibrate what we see in your home against what we first hand see in the market. How do you compare to the other choices?

And now we can finally sit down at the table, review the data and give you our best estimate of your particular home's value, and it will be a range because despite all the data gathered, there's still some art to it.

Now you'll notice nowhere in this valuation did we ask what you WANT or what you NEED to get for you home. Buyers are like honey badgers....they just don't care about what you want or need. It is purely about THEIR needs. If your price and product don't work for them, they WILL reject your home as a choice. No amount of marketing and effort on our part can overcome that.

However, that's not to say we don't consider YOUR needs during our meeting. If you're willing to provide us your mortgage balance, we'll input that into our custom net proceeds sheet and determine the price for breaking even (no check to you, but you're not paying to leave).

Now if that break even price is ABOVE what the market will bear, you may have a tough decision to make about whether to sell or stay. We can help provide you options if you still want to proceed.

And ultimately, YOU decide what you will and won't accept. Sometimes sellers decide that being "done" is more important than getting extra dollars.

We hope this helps you understand why calling a local REALTOR® is better than clicking on some online valuation website. If you're truly serious about selling your home, there's much more to the process than a mere computer can calculate.

Additional Information

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